"That said, some people hate to learn. They want the computer to make a 45 MB e-mail go through, rather than learn why it's a bad idea to e-mail such a monstrosity.

In the era of broadband... Mightn't it be time to change email so that id DOES handle large file transfers? "

It's not as simple as that. The receiving server almost certainly will run some kind of AV scanner on the received message before it gets to the users mailbox. Running AV scans on hundreds of thousands of multi-megabyte emails is no fun, and not a cheap or easy thing to have to do.

That's not even getting into the size of the mailboxes you'd need to store all that data for the users who use IMAP but don't ever delete anything.